Amalfi sighed as deeply as a sleeping child. Then he flipped the treacher switch from
“What do you want to do, poison me twice at the same meal?” Amalfi growled. “Get me an ultraphone line.”
The treacher’s voice changed at once. “Communications,” it said briskly.
“This is the mayor. Raise Lieutenant Lerner, Forty-fifth Acolyte Border Security Group. Don’t give up too easily; that was his last address, but he’s been upgraded since. When you get him, tell him you’re speaking for me. Tell him also that the cities in the jungle are organizing for some sort of military action, and that if he can get a squadron in here fast enough, he can break it up. Got it?”
“Yes, sir.” The Communications man read it back. “If you say so, Mayor Amalfi.”
“Who else would say so? Be sure Lerner doesn’t get a fix on us. Send it pulse-modulated if you can.”
“Can’t, boss. Mr. Hazleton just put us under way. Rut there’s a powerful Acolyte AM ultraphone station somewhere near by. I can get our message into synch with it, and make the cop’s detectors focus on the vector. Is that good enough?”
“Better, even,” Amalfi said. “Hop to it.”
“There’s one other thing, boss. That big drone you ordered last year is finally finished, and the shop says that it has Dirac equipment mounted in it and ready to go. I’ve inspected it and it looks fine, except that it’s as big as a life ship and just as detectable.”
“All right, good; but that can wait. Get the message out.”
“Yes, sir.”
The voice cut out entirely. The incinerator chute gaped suddenly, and the dishes rose from the table and soared toward the opening in solemn procession. The goblet of wine left behind a miasmic trail, like a miniature comet.
At the last minute, Amalfi jerked out of his reverie and made a wild grab in mid-air; but he was too late. The chute gulped down that final item and shut again with a satisfied slam.
Hazleton had left his slide rule upon the table.
The space-suited party moved cautiously and with grim faces through the black, dead streets of the city on the periphery. At the lead, Sergeant Anderson’s hand torch flashed into a doorway and flicked out again at once.
No other lights whatsoever could be seen in the dark city, nor had there been any response to calls. Except for a weak spindizzy field, no power flowed in the city at all, and even the screen was too feeble to maintain the city’s air pressure above four pounds per square inch—hence the space suits.
Inside Amalfi’s helmet O’Brian’s voice was saying, “The second phase is about to start in the jungle, Mr. Mayor. Lerner moved in on them with what looks from here like all of the Acolyte navy he dared to pull out of the cluster itself. There’s an admiral’s flagship in the fleet, but all the big brass is doing is relaying Lerner’s suggestions in the form of orders; he seems to have no ideas of his own.”
“Sensible setup,” Amalfi said, peering ahead unsuccessfully in the gloom.
“As far as it goes, sir. The thing is, the squadron itself is far too big for the job. It’s unwieldly, and the jungle detected it well in advance; we stood ready to give the alarm to the King as you ordered, but it didn’t prove necessary. The cities are drawing up in a rough battle formation now. It’s quite a sight, even through the proxies. First time in history, isn’t it?”
“As far as I know. Does it look like it’ll work?”
“No, sir,” the proxy pilot said promptly. “Whatever organization the King’s worked out, it’s functioning only partially, and damn sloppily. Cities are too clumsy for this kind of work even under the best hand, and his is a long way from the best, I’d judge. But we’ll soon see for ourselves.”
“Right. Give me another report in an hour.”
Anderson held up his hand and the party halted. Ahead was a huge pile of ultimately solid blackness, touched deceptively here and there with feeble stars where windows threw back reflections. Far aloft, however, one window glowed softly with its own light.
The boarding-squad men deployed quickly along opposite sides of the street while the technies took cover. Amalfi sidled along the near wall to where the sergeant was crouching.
“What do you think, Anderson?”
“I don’t like it, Mr. Mayor. It stinks of mouse traps. Maybe everybody’s dead and the last man didn’t have the strength to turn out the light. On the other hand, just
“I see what you mean. Dulany, take five men down that side street where the facsimile pillar is, follow it until you’re tangent to the corner of this building up ahead, and stick out a probe. Don’t use more than a couple of micro-volts, or you might get burned.”
“Yessir.” Dulany’s squad—the man himself might best be described as a detector-detector—slipped away soundlessly, shadows among shadows.
“That isn’t all I stopped us for, Mr. Mayor,” Anderson said. There’s a grounded aircab just around the corner here. It’s got a dead passenger in it. I wish you’d take a look at him.”
Amalfi took the proffered torch, covered its lens with the mitten of his suit so that only a thin shred of light leaked through and played it for half a second through the cab’s window. He felt his spine going rigid.
Wherever the light touched the flesh of the hunched corpse, it—glistened.
“Communications!”
“Yes, sir!”
“Set up the return port for decontamination. Nobody gets back on board our town until he’s been boiled alive— understand? I want the works.”
There was a brief silence. Then: “Mr. Mayor, the city manager already has that in the works.”
Amalfi grimaced wryly in the darkness. Anderson said, “Pardon me, sir, but—how did Mr. Hazleton guess?”
“Why, that’s not too hard to see, at least after the fact, sergeant. This city we’re on was desperately poor. And being poor under the new money system means being low on drugs. The end result, as Mr. Hazleton saw, and I should have seen, is—plague.”
“The sons of bitches,” the sergeant said bitterly. The epithet seemed intended to apply to every non-Okie in the universe.
At the same moment, a lurid scarlet glare splashed over his face and the front of his suit, and red lanes of light checkered the street. There was an almost-simultaneous flat crash, without weight in the thin air, but ugly- sounding.
“TDX!” Anderson shouted, involuntarily.
“Dulany? Dulany! Damn it all, I told the man to take it easy with that probe. Whoever survived on that squad, report!”
Underneath the ringing in Amalfi’s ears, someone began to laugh. It was as ugly a sound as the TDX explosion had been. There was no other answer.
“All right, Anderson, surround this place. Communications, get the rest of the boarding squad and half the security police over here on the double.”
The nasty laughter got louder.
“Whoever you are that’s putting out that silly giggle, you’re going to learn how to make another kind of noise when I get my hands on you,” Amalfi added viciously. “Nobody uses TDX on my men, I don’t care whether he’s an Okie or a cop. Get me? Nobody!”
The laughter stopped. Then a cracked voice said, “You lousy damned vultures.”
“Vultures, is it?” Amalfi snapped. “If you’d answered our calls in the first place, there’d have been no trouble. Why don’t you come to your senses? Do you
“Vultures,” the voice repeated. It carried an overtone of sinister idiocy. “Eaters of carrion. The gods of all stars will boil your bones for soup.” The cackling began again.
Amalfi felt a faint chill. He switched to tight-beam. “Anderson, keep your men at a respectable distance, and wait for the reinforcements. This place is obviously mined to the teeth, and I don’t know what other surprises our batty friend has for us.”
“I could lob a gas grenade through that window—”
